Don Pendleton - Enemies Within

“So, honorable service, then.”

“Nothing says otherwise, until this shit show he’s involved in with the rest of them.”

“You’re doubting the religious motive?” Bolan asked.

“Can’t disregard it, but it doesn’t sit well with me,” the big Fed replied. “You know these types are big on names, if they’re legit. First thing they do is sit around a table and decide what to call themselves.”

“Right.”

“Step two, they normally adopt Arabic names, but none of them has done that, either. Just the one, still going with his birth name.”

“Right.”

“On top of which, we have eyes inside ISIS, overseas and in the States, a couple sleeper cells that think they’re still secure. So far, nobody claims to know these guys, and they’d be trumpeting the news if half a dozen Army Rangers joined their cause en masse.”

“You’d think so, anyway. But if they’re faking the ISIS connection, what’s their end game?”

Brognola gave him a wry smile. “We won’t know that until you run them down.”

“Speaking of which, mobility should be our top priority on this.”

“Agreed.”

“What’s Jack up to, these days?”

“I’ve got him on standby.”

Jack Grimaldi was an ex-Mafia flyboy who could handle anything with wings or rotors. He had first crossed Bolan’s path while working for the Mafia, then converted to the big guy’s cause when he’d decided that his Mob-related life was going nowhere fast. Since then, he had delivered Bolan to hot spots around the world, providing air support as needed on the firing line. And, when necessary, he heard the call to arms and fought beside the Executioner on the line.

“Okay,” Bolan said. “Then I should be good, at least for now.”

“It would be nice if we could talk to someone from the team,” Brognola said, “but I don’t know how practical that is.”

“Rangers are trained the same as Green Berets and Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance—presumably the Company, as well—when it comes to resisting an interrogation. They all undergo hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, plus deprivation of warmth, water and food.”

“Of course,” the big Fed said, “that’s all illegal under various conventions, as we know.”

“And when has that stopped anyone on either side from using them?”

“I see your point. Some say we haven’t been the ‘good guys’ for a long time now, at least since 9/11.”

Bolan didn’t bother telling him to take it farther back, to Vietnam or even to the Philippines during the four-year Tagalog Insurgency kicked off in 1899. There was no point in hashing over ancient history, particularly when the here and now might bite them on the ass within hours or days.

“But if they can’t be caught alive...”

“Where are you parked?” Bolan asked his old friend, cutting their conversation short.

“In the metered garage on Memorial Avenue. You?”

“I found curb space outside, on Schuyler Avenue. I like the walk.”

“And you’ve got local digs?”

“The River Inn on Twenty-fifth Street Northwest, in DC.”

Brognola nodded. “Don’t get too comfortable.”

“When do I ever?”

They shook hands again and went their separate ways, each man freighted with secrets, craving answers he knew would be hard-won, if they could be unearthed at all.

Who was it that had once described the Russian mindset as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”? Bolan had the answer to that up front—it had been Winston Churchill, decades before anyone conceived the thought of ISIS or its killer spawn. This time, however, Bolan didn’t have a span of four decades to end a new Cold War.

He had to crack this riddle soon, before the whole thing went to hell.

Chapter Two

Bolan didn’t drive back to the River Inn at once. Instead he sat inside his rented Audi Compact Executive sedan, opened his laptop and popped in Brognola’s DVD.

The normal warnings stamped on every disk from Stony Man displayed themselves upon launch, as usual. Pointless, he thought, since anyone who’d stolen it would go ahead and watch it anyway, regardless of the threat of three years’ imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

There was no introduction. Just a half dozen icons labeled with the rank and surname of the subjects, waiting to reveal themselves upon command.

He started at the top, with Major Randall Darby, thirty-nine years old, a Ranger for the past fifteen. After fulfilling the Army’s requirements, he’d gone to Ranger school, beginning with the basic “crawl phase,” moving on to “mountain phase” at the remote Camp Merrill near Dahlonega, Georgia, passing on with honors to the “Florida phase” at Eglin Air Force Base, then on again to “desert phase” at Fort Bliss, Texas. Along the way, a journey of sixty-eight days, Darby’s leadership skills were judged by both his trainers and the other members of his squad, producing top marks on both sides.

After training, new Rangers typically found themselves in “the worst shape of their lives,” with common maladies including weight loss, dehydration, trench foot, heatstroke, frostbite, chilblains, fractures, tissue tears; swollen hands, feet and knees; nerve damage and loss of limb sensitivity, cellulitis, contact dermatitis, cuts and wildlife bites. Darby had survived it all, emerging with lieutenant’s bars.

He saw his first deployment overseas in Afghanistan, eight months after the US invasion, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. He spent two years “in the sand,” rotated home for additional training, then flew off again to Iraq, saw action in the Horn of Africa against Somali pirates, fought the militant Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in North Africa’s Greater Maghreb, helped reopen the Transit Center at Manas, in Kyrgyzstan, then rotated back to Fort Benning as a Ranger school supervisory officer.

The file contained full details of Darby’s classified missions, and Bolan reviewed them briefly, spending time enough to satisfy himself that there were no black marks against the major’s name, no indication whatsoever of dissatisfaction with the service or the slightest bent toward any kind of radical philosophy or creed.

And yet...

The next file up belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Knowlton, age thirty-five, a second-generation Ranger whose father, now deceased, had returned from Vietnam minus his right leg and left eye, after the Battle of Khe Sanh in Quang Trị Province, near its wind-down in July 1968. In the process, he had killed an estimated sixty-seven of General Vo Nguyen Giap’s North Vietnamese regulars and secured a Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, together with South Vietnam’s Meritorious Service Medal and a lifetime disability pension. His son had joined the Army right after graduating Alabama A & M, passed through Ranger school without a hitch, and served the years of duty every Ranger now expected in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in Africa’s Trans Sahara region, interdicting terrorists and drug shipments earmarked for Central Africa.

At last report, Knowlton had been a lifelong Southern Baptist and rock-ribbed conservative who shared his forebears’ trend of voting for Republicans, airing his patriotism in annual addresses to the local chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars while home on leave. No one had ever heard him say a kind word about Islam, much less seek to convert and aid its most radical faction as a terrorist.

So what had happened to him, then?

The file on Knowlton held no clue—unless, perhaps, it was an ambush he had led against a small al Qaeda faction active in Nigeria. Knowlton had personally slain three of the terrorists that day, discovering after the smoke cleared that the eldest of them was sixteen years old, the other two, twelve and thirteen. They were already seasoned killers, but had something in the act of killing them caused doubt to germinate in Knowlton’s mind or heart?